is wife about him.

Ten years after the publishing of these Colloquies, Southey's wife, who
had been, as Southey said, "for forty years the life of his life," had to
be placed in a lunatic asylum. She returned to him to die, and then his
gentleness became still gentler as his own mind failed. He died in 1843.
Three years before his death his friend Wordsworth visited him at
Keswick, and was not recognised. But when Southey was told who it was,
"then," Wordsworth wrote, "his eyes flashed for a moment with their
former brightness, but he sank into the state in which I had found him,
patting with both his hands his books affectionately, like a child."

Sir Thomas More, whose ghost communicates with Robert Southey, was born
in 1478, and at the age of fifty-seven was beheaded for fidelity to
conscience, on the 6th of July, 1535. He was, like Southey, a man of
purest character, and in 1516, when his age was thirty-eight, there was
published at Louvain his "Utopia," which sketched wittily an ideal
commonwealth that was based on practical and earnest thought upon what
constitutes a state, and in what direction to look for amendment of ills.
More also withdrew from his most advanced post of opinion. When he wrote
"Utopia" he advocated absolute freedom of opinion in matters of religion;
in after years he believed it necessary to enforce conformity. King
Henry VIII., stiff in his own opinions, had always believed that; and
because More would not say that he was of one mind with him in the matter
of the divorce of Katherine he sent him to the scaffold.

H. M.

COLLOQUY I.--THE INTRODUCTION.

"_Posso aver certezza_, _e non paura_,
_Che raccontando quel che m' e accaduto_,
_Il ver diro_, _ne mi sara creduto_."

"Orlando Innamorato," c. 5. st. 53.

It was during that melancholy November when the death of the Princess
Charlotte had diffused throughout Great Britain a more general sorrow
than had ever before been known in these kingdoms; I was sitting alone at
evening in my library, and my thoughts had wandered from the book before
me to the circumstances which made this national calamity be felt almost
like a private affliction. While I was thus musing the post-woman
arrived. My letters told me there was nothing exaggerated in the public
accounts of the impression which this sudden loss had produced; that
wherever you went you found the women of the family weeping, and that men
could scarcely speak o